The Flawed UN

A new web magazine, Triple Canopy, seeks to bring a more authentically "magazine-like" quality to its presentation of content. It's an interesting technological and aesthetic enterprise and the content's pretty good, too. There is, for example, an interesting pre-"monster" interview with Samantha Power. I liked this part:

HK: Do you think the UN is a functional organization?

SP: This is a distracting point. Not fully functional, no. But the UN’s dysfunctions are less the problem of the organization as such. They are the problem of governments and what they choose to pursue and neglect. Citizens have the power to make governments act differently; the UN as an organization does not. Sergio’s success would have been more robust, or more frequent, if governments had lined up behind him. Secretary-General Kofi Annan lining up behind him was not the same thing. There are plenty of changes that the UN as an organization can make to decrease its many inefficiencies, but the UN will continue to look dysfunctional until member states decide to prioritize global problems, which will require political pressure from below.

This is spot-on. There's a tendency to attribute policy failures of the UN's member states to "the UN" as if "the UN" is supposed to be able to take dramatic action in the face of indifference from the key countries. Meanwhile, you don't see the main people making this complaint arguing for measures to increase the independent capabilities of the UN organization. I note in Heads in the Sand that there are two kinds of people who point out inadequacies in existing international organizations (including the United Nations) -- those who genuinely want to do the difficult work of strengthening them and making it easier for them to cope with the problems they get charged with handling (which just so happen to tend to be the hardest problems in the world), and those who simply want to point to them in bad faith as part of a process of dismantling them.

Meanwhile (and relatedly) one thing critics of the UN tend to get vague about is "compared to what?" When the project isn't being dismissed as totally ineffectual, it tends to get dismissed as utterly utopian. Both critiques are, in my view, wrong but they're also a bit schizophrenic. The truth is simply that the UN's mission is difficult so we shouldn't be shocked that problems remain nor should we ignore the fact that a great deal of good is being done.

Comments

A friend of mine who has been trying to get UN agencies in a war-torn country to all point in the same direction said to me last week, "Given how screwed up the UN is, it is amazing that they don't screw up situations worse than they do."

Posted by NGO worker | April 1, 2008 2:24 PM

Hate to say this, but isn't this point obvious? The UN has no authority over sovereign nations, so clearly the UN will only run effectively if independent nations - mainly great power nations - care to see the organization perform as a major actor on the international stage. If there is no uniting goal of various states, then the UN won't be effective.

The global environment shifts, and so does the reliance on organizations like the UN. This is mainly International Relations 101.

Posted by graham | April 1, 2008 2:38 PM

I once asked Shashi Tharoor why he didn't put out bumper stickers saying something like "If you did not get SARS today, thank the UN!"

His answer was that it was up to the member states to promote UN successes. I am not sure the stock UN answer to every criticism was appropriate in that case, but I get the point. The UN is too busy putting out fires to sell itself with the passion and attention that the rest of the world's organizations can.

In fact, the UN is so much more than the Security Council and the General Assembly. The WHO, UNESCO, UNDP, WIPO, the High Commission for Refugees, UNSCOM, the UN Atomic Energy Commission, and UNICEF all have impressive records of accomplishment under adverse political conditions. Among these, WHO and UNICEF deserve special praise.

Someone (maybe you, Matthew) should write a book about all that the UN does right.

Posted by Siva Vaidhyanathan | April 1, 2008 2:45 PM

Citizens have the power to make governments act differently ... the UN will continue to look dysfunctional until member states decide to prioritize global problems, which will require political pressure from below

Jeez, this is idiotic. It's like Samantha Power doesn't even understand the existence of non-democratic regimes.

No, for the most part, citizens around the world do not have the power to make their government "act differently". And, no, for the most part, "political pressure from below" will not cause member states to prioritize global problems.

This is why many of us believe that the UN is hopelessly flawed, and support, instead the "Concert of Democracies" - which is the answer, BTW, to Matthew's question "compared to what?"

Posted by Al | April 1, 2008 2:55 PM

If only this were a comic book, and the UN had S.H.I.E.L.D. at it's disposal...

Posted by soullite | April 1, 2008 2:57 PM

It's an interesting technological and aesthetic enterprise and the content's pretty good, too

The type is a little too small for me, and when I enlarge it (in Firefox) the bottom part of the text gets cut off and there's no way to scroll it into visibility.

Posted by hum | April 1, 2008 3:34 PM

Matt left out a third type of critic--the critic who Matt left out a third type of critic--the Bush supporter who is looking for a scapegoat. If you are a Bush supporter, finding scapegoats to blame for the failures of the Bush Administration is a full time job. It was difficult for Bush supporters to ignore the genocide in Darfur while touting the "humanitarian" case for invading Iraq, so some of them decided to blame the U.N. for failing to stop the genocide. Of course, the reason that the U.N. didn't take action is that the leaders of the major countries, most notably Bush, didn't wMatt left out a third type of critic--the Bush supporter who is looking for a scapegoat. If you are a Bush supporter, finding scapegoats to blame for the failures of the Bush Administration is a full time job. It was difficult for Bush supporters to ignore the genocide in Darfur while touting the "humanitarian" case for invading Iraq, so some of them decided to blame the U.N. for failing to stop the genocide. Of course, the reason that the U.N. didn't take action is that the leaders of the major countries, most notably Bush, didn't want to take action.

Posted by Kenneth Almquist | April 1, 2008 3:47 PM

I think that this interview is very much post-"moster," and she references it in the interview itself:

As my recent aborted experience in electoral politics attests, it will be challenging for me to tailor what I know how to do to what actually needs doing... So my basic view on this is that, even after my idiotic blunder, which revealed only some of my many limitations, if a President Obama still thought there was some way for me to be useful, I would feel I had an obligation to put my money where my mouth is.

Note that she also remains open to accepting a position. Something I hope actually happens after the silly season is behind us and cooler heads prevail.

Posted by Seth A. Roby | April 1, 2008 4:05 PM

See Inis Claude's concept of "Two United Nations". Seems right to me.

Posted by Sam | April 1, 2008 4:16 PM

There's a tendency to attribute policy failures of the UN's member states to "the UN" as if "the UN" is supposed to be able to take dramatic action in the face of indifference from the key countries.

Wait a second. This is exactly the point. What use is the UN if can't impose "dramatic action" despite the "indifference" of said countries?

I think it's quite striking to look back on old footage of the countries in active debate on the floor at the UN: it seems like policy makers had more on-the-fly discourse on the floor of the UN, but today it seems like everyone becomes with a prepared speech, and a prepared policy decision. There doesn't really seem to be any constructive back-and-forth. Thus the "indifference" to what actually transpires once they're there.

The U.N. are not "arbitrators" per se when they allow this dynamic to play out...

That's at least part of the problem as I see it.

Posted by AKBY | April 1, 2008 4:37 PM

The UN is essentially washed up. The League of Nations failed because it had no credible enforcement mechanism. The UN was supposed to remedy that problem, but currently it's seen as "illegal" by many people for Security Council members to enforce it's most important Resolutions. Game over.

The World Body will probably limp along for a few more decades, providing a great venue for the cronies and family members of tin-horn dictators to organize New York shopping trips using the national treasury as a credit card while the population starves. And the best hotels in Africa can count on steady business from UN "consultants". The WHO and UNICEF will probably even continue to do some good, if at inflated prices.

As a serious part of the international security architecture, however, it is the geopolitical equivalent of a perpetual Munich Conference.

Posted by Robert Powell | April 1, 2008 4:37 PM

I hope that this sort of insight is reflected in Heads in the Sand, because MY's commentary sometimes gives the impression that international organisations/ internationalist approaches actually solve problems, whereas it's actually common interests between states that make these international organisations work, which are in turn reliant on compatible social forces and elites dominant in those states. The IOs are the very last stage of any workable arrangement for international cooperation.

Posted by otto | April 1, 2008 5:40 PM

That design eschews all of the benefits of interactivity. You can't even link to a specific page of a multi-page document. Despite its ajaxy feel, it's ridiculously old-school and won't work unless they implement some pretty simple changes.

Posted by Dave Meyer | April 1, 2008 6:04 PM

Jeez, this is idiotic. It's like Samantha Power doesn't even understand the existence of non-democratic regimes.

The beauty of the internet is that simple-minded right wingers can pretend they are smarter than Harvard scholars.

I assure you, Al, that Ms. Power understands the existence of undemocratic regimes. What you don't understand is that even the citizens of undemocratic regimes sometimes have checks on the regime's power, such as demonstrations, possible coups, and foreign pressure. For instance, even though I bow to nobody in condemning the evil regime that runs the People's Republic of China, I assure you that even though they are totally undemocratic, they must still take public opinion into account in making their decisions. Maybe Kim Jong Il doesn't have to, but many undemocratic regimes do.

So that gets us back to the UN. The UN does what its member states let it do. If the member states decide they want the UN to be ineffective in certain areas, it will be ineffective. And it can be democracies, undemocratic regimes, or both, which can render it ineffective in particular situations.

Posted by Dilan Esper | April 1, 2008 8:58 PM

I don't want my web "magazines" to be more authentically magazine-like. I want them to be more authentically web-like. Slavish adherence to a paper metaphor is just plain dumb. Not to mention that most of the content is pretty weird, e.g, the piece on the International Necronaut Society, which, apparently, may or may not really exist.

Posted by Sean Peters | April 1, 2008 9:06 PM

“Jeez, this is idiotic. It's like Samantha Power doesn't even understand the existence of non-democratic regimes.”

The argument is about lines of attributions of responsibility first and foremost, and that point stands on its own. Any attempt at a coherent analysis has to distinguish between failure attributable to systemic issues and those of individual states at the outset regardless.

The idea of people being able to influence state actors, through political will, is just one of the reasons why that distinction is important to tracing out possible avenues of effective reform, but it certainly doesn’t stand or fall on that rather caricatured reading of Power.

The point Power is making is that powerful democratic actors, such as the US, have hugely disproportionate influence over the possibility of effective multilateralism, and as such, could play a far more constructive role, if they didn’t so rely on “the UN” as a monolithic to play domestic political football. If it were otherwise, the population might more readily distinguish between those dysfunctions which are inherent to organisation’s design, and those which are cemented by deliberate complicity in setting up the UN to fail, for instance.

Ultimately, I think this aspect of failure is poorly understood and exposed to the general public, in contrast to the tinpot dictatorships talking point, which is far more salacious and easily comprehensible, which makes it ripe for exploitation as a convenient overarching narrative – which in the end makes it grossly exaggerated.

“This is why many of us believe that the UN is hopelessly flawed, and support, instead the "Concert of Democracies" - which is the answer, BTW, to Matthew's question "compared to what?"

Well, if you’ve actually read the literature on Concert of Democracies, you would know it has only ever been proposed as a supplementary forum for Democratic nations to legitimate collective security action in the face of intractable gridlock on the Council. It has never, by anyone who is a serious scholar in international relations, been suggested as a replacement for a universal organisation such as the United Nations.

Posted by Will Fettes | April 1, 2008 9:50 PM

Why is this new web magazine named "Triple Canopy"? What an unfortunate title. Triple Canopy is a hug "private security" outfit that has received contracts in Iraq. Call it "Triple Tent" or "Three Guys in the Shade." UNLESS (cue music) it is not a coincidence AT ALL.....

Posted by Tim | April 2, 2008 2:16 AM

I note in Heads in the Sand that there are two kinds of people who point out inadequacies in existing international organizations (including the United Nations) -- those who genuinely want to do the difficult work of strengthening them and making it easier for them to cope with the problems they get charged with handling (which just so happen to tend to be the hardest problems in the world), and those who simply want to point to them in bad faith as part of a process of dismantling them.

Undoubtedly some people point to flaws in the UN that, even if they were corrected, wouldn't redeem the UN in their own eyes. It may be bad faith if there is a pretence that these are the only objections such people have, but how is it inherently in bad faith to make such arguments?

It's a normal part of political debate to make arguments you think will make a difference in the minds of people who don't accept all the other arguments you make. It is bad faith for pro-choicers who themselves don't aim to reduce abortion to argue that they think bans on abortion would do little to reduce abortion rates? If they believe it, surely not. Likewise, how is it bad faith for people who actually believe the UN is corrupt and undemocratic to point this out just because they are in principle against the erosion of national sovereignty by international institutions, however honest and democratic?

Posted by Peter | April 2, 2008 2:23 PM